Name: Crown of Lamb
Ingredients: 1 loin of lamb; small piece of pork; coarse sea salt; gravy (for serving)

Why it works: Lamb and pork match in chemistry and in kitchens. They rank in the top 7% of all ingredient pairs, and cooks put them together in 623 recipes. Both carry 2,4-nonadienal, which smells fatty, green. The science ↓

Crown of Lamb

Ingredients

1 loin of lamb
small piece of pork
coarse sea salt
gravy (for serving)

Directions

Prepare

Split the bones of the loin between the chops and scrape each bone.
Roll the loin into a circle and secure it with a skewer and string.
Wrap a small piece of pork around each bone to prevent burning.

Roast and serve

Roast for 10 minutes per pound, basting well.
Serve with a small frill of paper on each bone and gravy.

Recipe from a historical cookbook (Internet Archive).

Transcribed from a scanned cookbook and modernised for today's kitchens. Where the book gave no heat or time, or said "a moderate oven", the temperatures and times here may be modern equivalents rather than the book's own figures.

Explore the science

The flavor team

The pairs that carry this dish. Each one is judged two ways: how much their aromas overlap, and how often cooks already put them together.

Lamb + porktop 7% of all pairs

Smell alikestrong

Cooked together623 recipes

Shared aroma: 2,4-nonadienal (fatty, green).

Ranks compare each pair with 20,000 random ingredient pairs on CompKitchen. How we score pairs

What each ingredient does

Lamb loin: Forms the main meat; the rolled loin cooks as one joint with its chops.
Pork: Wrapped around the bones as a shield so they do not burn during roasting.

“What each ingredient does” and “The step that matters” were written by Claude from this recipe’s own method and reviewed in samples by CompKitchen.